Tag: musings
I, the infinite? instants…
I, Gelaftimus
A jumble of words. A spasm, a syndrome. The spraying of a passing fancy, designation.
You don’t know where I got these words, nor do I, or only rarely. A voided origin, a lifetime suffering verbs and the masks of nouns.
Experience: feels like something moving forward, somethings breaking and tumbling about it. “Feels like.”
A kind of perceptual first instance, shaped by everything before, altered by everything after.
At the limit then, boundary-lip, threshold. Moving, and that ceaselessly. Colliding.
A poet, after committing suicide in his youth, now festering under the ground, is found to have remarked that “a tree grows upward…the path of least resistance.” So most of us.
Whatever “us” might mean, a jumble of words, perhaps a spasm, unconscious and involuntary instinct, so carefully and meticulously learned: to say.
Gelaftimus is what I feel today, this moment, my wife sitting and stewing on her couch, me (whatever “me” might mean) crabbing over my desk, this white paper, with a ball-point pen, scribbling – “a jumble of words, a spasm. A syndrome.” Perhaps. But it is gelaftimus, I tell you that.
Early on I was assigned this particular label: “Nathan,” only later coming to find that “the meaning of a word is determined entirely by its context. In fact, there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of its usage.” (V.N. Volosinov, et. al.) “Feels like” experience.
Needless to say, “I” have struggled with defining the cluster of words “I,” “Nathan,” “man,” “boy,” “me,” “son,” “husband,” “father” and so on in their perpetually altered contexts, circumstances and situations, ever re-de-term-in-ing their possible meanings.
A jumble of words. A spasm and syndrome. Instinct and accomplishment (accomplice-ment?)
My wife, last night on the swing, beside me, in the dark, on the porch, spoke of “not being allowed to say” as a child – so very many experiences “not to talk about” – frozen (perhaps) in their places or processed without knowledge dementedly deep underground (out of sight, out of mind, and so forth).
Contextually, she was addressing the decades-old infancy of “figuring out the world around me and my relation in and to it.”
“Reality works in overt mystery”
which I found (what she said) to feel like truth (as in actuality) – the jumble of words, the spasms and syndromes of “making words fit.” The odd difficulty we sometimes name “maturity,” i.e. beginning and growth.
I would confuse myself in this (were I to find me).
Alas it floats on the crest of the wave, breaks and spreads on the shore, regathers in a reflective pool, drifts away and starts again in fragments and particles.
Poised on a threshold, hardly poised. Rather in the breeze, a metaphor passing hands.
This jumble of words. Syndromes and spasms. Accumulated masterfully and haphazardly over ages and accidents. Feels like, experience.
Gelaftimus, today.
“A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; [or making it fit with prefabricated words? –N.F.] and in writing [that babble at the crest of the wave –N.F.] one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) [?! –N.F.] and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, [ever creating more waves – N.F.] it makes words to fit it [or fits it to words which recognize? – N.F.]”
I, for Instants, inevitable infinity
Attempts at Auto-bio-graphy, or, self-life-writing, or, the inevitably ineffable
longitude
lassitude
aberrations of pain
with twisting serpents
origin: absence
defined by failure and loss
the inevitably ineffable
so say it
I do not love myself
nor find a self to love
and it’s nobody’s fault
but mine
(who?)
a descent of crows
inevitable,
ineffable,
undone
and scoring marks
into a void
of absence
and solitude
without a solo
no validation
no remorse
an abyss of ontology
and chaos of course
vocation
fashioning masks
of contexts
and stories
aberrations
of hypotheses
blind, deaf
and dumb
insurmountable
point
Borges’ Aleph
all,
if
uncertain
promise
trial and error
errantly
possible
within, without
and unlikely
unless
I do not love myself
and find no self to love
and it’s nobody’s fault
but mine
(whose?)
unless
undone
inevitably
ineffable
I say
Anthropophobia: or, the Trouble with Misanthropy
Anthropophobia: or, the Danger of Others
Let’s face it: our primary threat is the Other.
Those alive and breathing, in need.
Replete with sense and emotions, desires.
Thoughts, feelings, and dreams.
Con-fused.
Instinct and culture,
Learning and language,
and bodies:
physiques requiring space,
ears, eyes, limbs and digits,
the nerve!(s) and bellies and hearts.
Brains complete with mind and will,
Choice and intent,
the capability to discern.
Sexual organs,
Breath-pollution.
Stealing glances –
the lechery of looking –
what they plunder to hear.
This multitude of selves and their interests,
their tumultuous clamor to survive
and their ubiquity:
disruption of personhoods and presence
leaving The Exit as the only escape.
Most dangerous, Other:
the contact, connection,
and ability to attach.
Insidious deception –
a paradox of similarity,
of kind –
some others so like
as to be indistinguishable,
from our selves.
The Temptation to Exist
“’I am both wound and knife’ – that is our absolute, our eternity”
“the idolatry of becoming”
“blasted joys and jubilant despair”
The Temptation to Exi(s)t
We’ve got our words all backwards. Ever trapped in what we deny. Our escape = net.
Space. Time.
If we say it is all relative, yet act. “Choose.” Freedom is nothing. The words, then, are all backwards, you see, we “mean” our opposites.
Desire.
Could cumulate as the evil. But still – you see? Hope for understanding, for wisdom, knowledge, some trivial insight. Log of shipwreck: cling.
Desire.
Another enemy: “intensity.” Synonym “passion,” carpe diem. Opposite: freedom.
In-tense-ity. State of inhabiting tension, clinging to stress, to invite suffering (“jubilant despair”). Opposite: being. freedom.
A blasted joy. (Suffering). Opposite of freedom: want. Making antonyms by definition: “to be.”
If we seize, choose, behave, acquire, reach, speak, move…”the idolatry of becoming” – antonym? = freedom.
Kingdom equals freedom. Queendom. Selfdom. “To be”-dom. Backwards words. Backwords.
Opposite of intense: rest, quietude : thought and action one : in-sane. Opposite of want, greed : poverty : possession-less, without, without within : beggar.
Freedom : opposite : control. Self-, other-, environmental-, habitation-, security-.
Be/have : to exist is to grab, to steal, to do violence. Being + having : system : be/have. Opposite: freedom.
Say it backwards. We say it backwards.
I shout “freedom” driving the blade into my throat, bloody want. Cannot “have.” Are (are NOT = desire to become – false worship – be/having).
Religion : human organization to be/have. Become. To be. Religion as an argument for (against) existence.
Already ARE. Before “being,” prior to “having.” No need : freedom. “Meaning” the opposite of what we say.
We’ve got our words backwords.
Backwards: have-been. There it is clear.
The temptation of the system, the race or kind, was “to be” as something to have, to get, to come into, be-come…that existence was a goal, something to arrive at, achieve, seizing the days, the moments,
Synonyms: act, will, intent, purpose, do.make.say.think. to mean
Synonym: be/having
Opposite: freedom.
Existence having been from the first.
Having been = at the last.
Synonym : freedom : nothing.
Stopping to think, or, “not finding my own words,” or, “something to uncommunicate” (Blanchot)
My Own Words
Stopping to think, and using my tongue, a silent and plural speech, writing, how thinking does not stop.
There are clouds, many-layered in many motions, colluding, in sky.
I would see them, were I to face the outside.
Inside, no difference.
Letting speech beyond. No beyond, in part.
I had written, earlier, “so not finding my own words…”
A song was playing (is playing, NOW) in which a deep-voiced singer repeats “all thoughts are prey to some beast.” He repeats the phrase enough times (so that it seems like more than enough) that I hear it: the phrase, his voice, drums and strings.
Earlier it was about trees and soil, beach and sea, which have no language. I had thought perhaps I did. “Not finding my own words,” alas.
It makes for quiet. A banner fastened over the mouth: blood-red, pitch-black.
Begun before, though, the plural.
Taken outside by the hand. Inside, outside – no difference. “Not finding my own words,” as earlier.
B called it “weariness” and “infinite conversation,” requiring interruption. Causing a silence (stubborn, sullen) and a listening (unavoidable, imposed). Plurality. “Not finding my own words,” I pilfer.
Dissemination.
The launch – erasing – opposite of launch.
Why I like the word “thrum” (“not finding my own words”) and “inscribe.”
Bent, crooked, stooped over a desk with a lamp of single bulb, I imagine “scribe” as “scholar.” Inscription going both ways, like tying a knot requires both ends. Binding.
Such physicality to the immaterial.
As easy as lying (also snatched from a spine).
Stopping to think on how thinking never ceases.
“Not finding my own words” I turn, reverting to the silent plural speech of my mouth’s hand.
I call it “writing,” not finding my own words, even for that.
N Filbert, 2012
Writer Neurosis…inevitable…dose of reality…purely journaling
This morning my horrorscope advised me not to begin new projects but to complete the ones underway. We don’t put a lot of stock in the stars in my household, but I reflected on this one for awhile…jotting the following in my journal:
Projects piling up
pages and pages in manuscript
– all of them –
my work sustains
only immaterial parts of myself –
Nothing, else
so stacks
and stacks
and stacks
of papers filled by pens
notebooks, journals, folders full
a wife, seven children
a house, utilities
a car, a yard, fuel
food, shelter, clothing
activities
no way to insure
no bartering fodder
just thought
and effort
and art
and thousands of books read, to read
what are these values?
what is my “system”?
beliefs?
I see a photograph
– it becomes words
I view a painting
– becomes words
hear music and speech
– becomes text
feel emotions, bodies
– become language
taste food or drink
– and write
hope, dream, surmise
– and write
read, learn, look & listen
– for words
“as if the language itself could take us where it will never go”
-Ron Loewinsohn-
p.s. unfortunately, I seem inherently averse to “submission” in any form… L alas
I, for instants…renewed?
Neologism
I wish I were an I, some gathered locus of selves, remarkable.
A fullness that might be characterized, signified.
Even the assortment of lines that structure my name – hundreds of corners and swerves, crossings and redirections, don’t represent much of me.
And the little pronouns – they might direct one toward the objective subject that I am, but they’re pointing everywhere.
So I scribble, sketch, doodle and draw, adding lines upon lines, erasing, rewriting, deleting and searching thesauri and definitions…
It comes out looking like this:
or sometimes this:
signs and diagrams, theoretical possibilities, charts and patterns, fantasies, dreams
ever in search of the neologism
some necessary invented term
Affinities : Possessing the Wordless
The following quotations are from “Putting Down Marks (my life as a draftsman)” by Jim Dine. Where he uses “draw” or “drawing” substitute “write” or “writing” and I find a remarkable similarity with my own experience making things…I find his work and thought quite inspiring to my own and wanted to share with you many writers/artists/thinkers…
“I’ve always had a wish to put down marks”
“My mind was going and so was my hand”
“I love building up, erasing, losing it, bringing it back, taking it away. I trust my method of not trusting”
“He’s always so frightened of failure and of finishing, and that moves me” (of Giacometti)
“But what is really the optimal situation for me is to get my brain around what I’m trying to do. That’s all.”
“I have a total connection between my hand and my eye – it’s just that I can’t see sometimes”
“Drawing is not an exercise. Exercise is sitting on a stationary bicycle and going nowhere. Drawing is being on a bicycle and taking a journey. For me to succeed in drawing, I must go fast and arrive somewhere. The quest is to keep the thing alive – “
“I’m interested in making a vehicle within which it is possible to feel certain things…And these emotions don’t have words. They really don’t”
“I want to get my drawing out of my heart the way photography accesses my marginal thoughts and images”
“The state of wanting to draw something, for me, is a way to capture it and that’s a primary emotion for me.”
“I want to possess them and what better way of possessing them than to draw them. The reason I wanted to possess them is they reminded me of other things that are wordless”
“Drawing is the medium which has been the blood of my life”
THANK YOU JIM DINE!
All my Words are Silent 